At 2:48 PM -0700 7/12/05, Bill Stewart wrote: >It'd be nice if good crypto and authentication methods >could create a market for improved products
It can, it does, and it's called significantly reduced risk-adjusted transaction cost in financial econ-speak. Maybe the marketing droids need to come up with a 50's-era "secret" ingredient, a cryptographic "Floristan(tm)", but frankly, I don't think they're going to have to. Frankly, however, I think that reduced transaction costs creates *dis*economies of scale by reducing barriers to market entry and thus firm-size, and reducing proprietary anything to fungible graded commodities traded in so-called (see your Econ 51 textbook) perfectly competitive markets, instead of monopolistic competition (brands, trademarks, patents and other artifacts of batch-driven industrial production), which is what we have today. Think of it as the financial equivalent of grey-goo, or, better, blood-music, or whatever. Linux vs Novel/MS-DOS/Unix(tm) for instance, or, again better, IETF-esque protocols replacing various proprietary secret-sauce bit-slinging methods. BTW, Perry, I think that as we get to online instantaneity for every transaction, we eventually converge to pre-underwritten pre-encrypted pre-authenticated quasi-anonymous unique value-bits circulating on public networks: internet bearer financial cryptography protocols, in other words. Cheers, RAH "But you *knew* I was gonna say *that*, right?" -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]